Fine Lines in High Yield (Part CXXVII): Lamination and Coating Equipment

摘要

At the last TPCA Show I noticed a remarkable variety of new coating and lamination equipment and upgrades of established equipment lines that prompted me to do a short review of this subject. It has been quite some time since Tech Talk looked at critical hot roll lamination parameters in a two part series (see Ref. 1-2). In the late 1990s we then looked into opportunities for improved laminator designs, notably laminators that featured "crowned" rolls for more uniform pressure across the lamination nip and lamination equipment capable of applying much higher pressure than conventional equipment (see Ref. 3-5). Such designs are now commercially available. My colleague Ed Hagan and I also tried to systematically catalogue types of lamination wrinkles, probe their root causes, and propose corrective actions (see Ref. 6). More recently, I took a fresh look at vacuum lamination since there appeared renewed interest in the technology based on new applications and needs (Ref. 7).